The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

like my mother-in-law.
    I should invite her over to give me decorating tips.
    “Yes. He will be OK. He is a good man,” Hanna says.
    I put on the new-me smile. The others look at her in a silent surprise. She probably crossed their line with this one. She quickly adds, turning to me:
    “I mean, you were just unlucky. If you were born here in Iceland, you would never have seen war and…you are a new man now. We will just hope that the Americans will not find you.”
    They all mumble their yeses and I assure them:
    “I think, with my Icelandic passport, I’ll be OK.”
    Again a round of nods.
    “Yes, Father Friendly did not die in vain,” Torture then proclaims, putting his heavy hand on my shoulder.
    The phrase is too difficult for Goodmoondoor to understand. His friend has to explain the words “in vain.” The simple one lights up:
    “Yes, he died for Tommy’s sins!”
    There you have it. Mr. Christ got the day off and Mr. Friendly stepped into his shoes.
    You just have to love this religion. First you shoot 125 people, and once your conscience starts getting bad (around #124), all you have to do is to find someone holy enough to carry your sins. Then you just shoot him and, bang! —he’s off with them to heaven. You never have to see or think about them again.
    I’m slowly getting used to my new name. Gun still uses Tod though. She calls a lot. I answer half the time. Wedding is inevitable, I guess, but for the time being I try to keep her at bay. I’m not ready yet. I need to get Munita out of my system, or out of my fridge at least (I sometimes see her head there, between the local milk cartoons and the Polish salami monster). I’m also not sure how well her parents will take it. Saving my life is one thing, but giving me their daughter is another altogether. Most of all, though, I need to finish this fucking therapy.
    The ice-girl regularly invites herself for a visit, but I assure her that no woman has ever set foot on this floor, and the sight of a homegrown beauty would undoubtedly set off a riot in the barracks. The Jaroslaws would all burst into my room and get busy with Gun, asking me to hold the camera.
    But trying to hold back love is like trying to hold back lava. Running lava that is. One day, when coming back from work, I find the Daybreak Girl sitting out in the kitchen with the Bulgarian mountain of fun. I wonder what they’re talking about. He must be asking her whether any one of her forty lovers was black. I’m surprised that she hasn’t been raped yet. She must be too white for him.
    “I told you, you shouldn’t come here. You’re like a lamb in a lion’s den here,” I whisper to her as we walk back to my cell.
    “Well, you didn’t want to come and see me, so I had to come and see you,” she says with an ice-cold, gum-chewing smile. She looks casually sexual or sexually casual, depending on which one is better English.
    “That guy is dangerous. He’s so lonely he’s like a black hole. He could swallow you up in an instant. What were you talking about?”
    “Nothing really. He was just telling me about his family farm. That his mother makes her own jams, and that he used to pick the berries himself or whatever.”
    So he’s a berry-picker as well. The greatest disguise is still getting better. We enter my space and there is no more talking for the next forty minutes. For this procedure I have to bring the futon down from its rocky base. We also try to keep our body-sounds down, since, as mentioned before, the walls of my room do not travel all the way up to the ceiling. (The cell sometimes reminds me of a big toilet stall.) I don’t want to risk ending up in the sexual department of Balatov’s brain, being stored away on a shelf, like a jam in a jar, right next to him and Patti LaBelle in the back of her limo.
    Then we lie together on the thick mattress, me and my warm Gun, and watch the neon lights and listen to the cars move about on the parking lot below. It’s closing time. The Day 3 Girls in the fancy tile shop and the Indian furniture heaven across the lot are off for the day, shooting car locks with their small key-guns or being picked up by their impatient boyfriends driving black BMWs.
    “How do you say Iceland in Icelandic?”
    “Ísland.”
    “Wow. Sounds like Easeland.”
    “Yeah. You got it right.”
    “But it doesn’t seem right. You Easelanders never seem to be at ease.”
    “You can say that,” says Gunnhildur. “We’re very impatient